Monthly Archives: November 2012

On Thursday, Tottenham Hotspur played Rome’s Lazio club in a Europe League game. Before the match began, a number of Spurs fans were hanging out in Rome’s Campo de Fiori square when they were attacked by 50 to 100 “Ultras” armed with knives, baseball bats and brass knuckles. The Ultras are described as right-wing, which I take it means left-wing. They trashed a bar called the Drunken Ship and seriously »

Much of the commentary on this year’s election implies that the Republican Party is at a low ebb, if not actually on the path to extinction. But of course that isn’t true: at the state and local levels, the party is doing better than it has in decades. Glenn Reynolds writes: IF REPUBLICANS ARE DROWNING IN A DEMOGRAPHIC TIDAL WAVE, WHAT EXPLAINS THIS CHART? State Government Control Since 1938. Let »

Whether or not you think that human-generated carbon dioxide has any significant effect on the Earth’s climate–I don’t–the data on where CO2 comes from are interesting. This chart, based on data maintained by BP, was generated by Ed Hoskins and reported by Anthony Watts on Watts Up With That: A few observations: 1) CO2 emissions are mainly a measure of economic growth. 2) U.S. emissions are lower today than they »

Larry Hagman, who died yesterday at the age of 81, was of course best known for playing the evil J.R. Ewing on Dallas, a show that I never much watched and found boring on the few occasions when I did. I enjoyed Hagman much more on I Dream of Jeannie. I recall backpacking around Europe in the summer of 1980 right after graduating from college, and people I’d meet, upon »

The Wall Street Journal this morning carries a feature by my pal Stephen Moore about the elfin Grover Norquist, who reminds us that Democratic promises about future spending cuts to accompany immediate tax increases are “imaginary unicorns.” Which brought to mind a useful phrase that Churchill applied to his old friend David Lloyd-George that we ought to revive and deploy just now—“the Happy Warrior of Squandermania.” Here’s the full quotation, »

In the new issue of the Weekly Standard Jay Cost undertakes a retrospective on what happened in the election just passed. Cost detects a mystery. It’s the case of the missing voters: In 2008, some 131.5 million Americans went to the polls; while the votes are still being tallied, this time around there probably were between 127 and 130 million votes cast. Most of the decline came from white voters; »

In an article referenced by Scott earlier today, Byron York shows that Mitt Romney did not lose the election because of his failure to win the Hispanic vote. Romnwy would have lost in Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire even if he had gained a large portion of the Hispanic votes in these key battleground states. York also demonstrates that, as we have argued, Hispanics are not a natural »

As Paul noted earlier today, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi followed up his supposed diplomatic triumph in Gaza by claiming new, more or less dictatorial powers. Morsi’s announcement was greeted with outrage by many Egyptians, some of whom took to the streets: [A]nti-Morsi demonstrators set fire to Muslim Brotherhood offices in cities across Egypt on Friday. As enraged demonstrators torched Muslim Brotherhood offices in several Egyptian cities, a defiant Egyptian President »

Yesterday, in commenting on President Obama’s apparent conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood represents the wave of the future in the Middle East, I noted the unimpressive nature of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s electoral victory. But it is not popularity that makes Morsi and the Brotherhood look like the wave of the future. Rather, it is their will to power — the same sort of will that made Hitler and Stalin »

Referring to United States Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, Paul Mirengoff has been asking (here and here) whether we want a dupe as Secretary of State. Good question. On Wednesday at a UN press briefing, a reporter asked Rice to explain her view of the controversy concerning her 9/16 comments on five Sunday news shows regarding the 9/11 Benghazi attack that took the lives of four Americans. Thus spake »

In her weekly Wall Street Journal column, Kimberly Strassel takes up an issue that is in need of updating since the final vote in the election is nearly tabulated: To win the next presidential race, the GOP will have to understand what went wrong in 2012. To do that, they’ve got to come to grips with what did, and did not, happen with turnout. Even as Republicans have engaged in »

I haven’t seen a better analysis of the cease-fire agreement that ended, for now, the conflict between Israel and Hamas than this one by David Goldman in FrontPage Magazine. Here are excerpts: Hamas fires 275 rockets at Israel and is rewarded with de facto acceptance as a legitimate negotiating partner in the Middle East peace process, as well as with a relaxation of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast. »

Fareed Zakaria claims that Israel dominates the New Middle East. He concludes, therefore, that Israel’s existence is not in danger. But in his analysis, Zakaria never once mentions Iran. I think it’s widely understood that Zakaria is overrated as a pundit. With this column, he shows himself to be unserious. »

I’m only half way through it, but with our readers starting to think about Christmas shopping, I want to join the chorus of praise for Jake Tapper and his new book about the war in Afghanistan, The Outpost. Tapper is well-known as one of the few real journalists in the Washington press corps, but The Outpost is an achievement of a whole different order of magnitude. It tells the story »

If you follow the news you’ve no doubt heard of the Higgs boson (named for physicist Peter Higgs), the mysterious subatomic particle that helps explain the Big Bang and the “standard model” of the universe. But there is another important Higgs hypothesis that you should know about—named for economist and historian Robert Higgs—that explains the big bang of endless expansion of modern government. In his pathbreaking 1988 book Crisis and »

One story that I’ve been meaning to comment on is the GQ interview with Marco Rubio. Attention has focused mostly on the interviewer’s out-of-the-blue question, “How old do you think the Earth is?” I didn’t think Marco answered it particularly well, but the incident certainly does indicate, as many have noted, that the left’s effort to diminish Rubio in advance of the 2016 election is well underway. But I want »

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers! 2012 has been in many respects a disappointing year, in some an awful one. But there remains a great deal to be thankful for. Among many other things, we are grateful for our conservative friends and allies who keep alive the vision of a better nation and a better world. About that holiday shopping: although I don’t think we have ever mentioned it, »